Thursday, October 7, 2010

An e-mail a Duke student intended to share with a few of her friends has become the talk of the Internet in recent days. Karen Owen (on the left in photo) sent a seriously explicit kiss-and-tell message to a few of her friends, detailing how she had sex with 13 men on campus, many of them Duke lacrosse players. She included a Powerpoint presentation complete with their photos and with graphic references to their body parts and their performance in bed. It wound up circulating among the whole Duke student body and on to Internet blogs and even the Today Show.

Needless to say, the players are angry (some of them, anyway), and there's talk of lawsuits. It's yet another example of what I'm tempted to call the IDD syndrome -- Inadvertent Digital Disclosure. As great as all these electronic communication channels are about spreading the word, it sure seems people would be smarter now about how and what they share on them. But these things just seem to keep happening. Maybe the technology is outpacing our common sense.